ENGLEWOOD — Colleen Siemian and her husband, Walter, sat in Section 128, just above the visiting team's tunnel and next to a group of Cowboys fans wearing cowboy boots and cowboy hats and speaking with thick Texas accents.

Her stomach was queasy with nerves, as it always is on game days, but it was especially so last Sunday because she knew it was a big game. The some 30 members of the unofficial Trevor Siemian fan club — college and family friends — who joined them at Sports Authority Field at Mile High knew it, too.

And of course the four fellows next to them knew it. Early on, one quipped that the stadium's scoreboard was likely the size of Jerry Jones' home television. Another asked Walter and Colleen which player they were there for. When Colleen told them Trevor Siemian, the Broncos' starting quarterback and their son, the four men played dumb: "Who is that?"

"As the game progressed, one of the guys said, 'They don't believe that that's your son because you would be sitting in the boxes,' " Colleen recalled. "I said, 'No. Trevor's not there. As a matter of fact, he's the lowest-paid quarterback in the NFL.' "

Welcome to Siemians' strange reality, a reality that still doesn't feel like their own, even after two-plus years.

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Their son is the quarterback few in Denver truly believed could be an NFL starter. He was the successor to Peyton Manning by appointment in 2016 but not by unanimous decision from the fans. He wasn't the veteran signed during the offseason to be the bridge to the future, and he wasn't the first-round draft pick drafted to be the future.

He was just that seventh-rounder.

For a long time, Siemian's Broncos teammates could see what others didn't, and could read between the lines of a story changed daily, if not hourly, about the team's quarterback competition. For some, it was noticeable long before Siemian was noticed.

"I knew Trevor had potential when we would see him scout-teaming in 2015," safety Darian Stewart said on a recent radio appearance. "He always had a strong arm. He was always smart. Him learning from Peyton in 2015, I thought that was the best thing for him and that took him into year two with a confident mind-set and he's continuing to grow."

It's only Week 3. But through his first 16 starts, Siemian not only has become The Guy for the Broncos, he has taken a seat among elite NFL company and has forced a collective about-face from those fixated on his draft status.

It has his mug at the top, his height and weight listed to the side and a throwaway line about John Elway's diligence "in finding a competitor for the backup quarterback position." But the rest of the page that should be cluttered with Mike Mayock-isms is curiously blank.

Then a kid from Northwestern still hobbled by an ACL injury, Siemian's future was blank too. He gave thought to moving on from the game entirely and accepting a promised position at a commercial real estate firm.

But then-Broncos coach Gary Kubiak saw something.

"Kubes pointed him out to me during his first year in camp and said, 'Take a peek at this kid we drafted in the seventh round,' " former Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer said. "Kubiak has a pretty good eye for talent and finding guys who, in the quarterback position, can do a little bit of everything. And Kubes was real high on his abilities."

High enough that the injury that turned off the majority of NFL teams fortuitously landed Siemian in Denver, where he beat out Zac Dysert in the 2015 preseason and learned from Manning on a run to the Super Bowl.

"I was lucky," Siemian said. "I got to see how he went through the week and his day to day and how he progressed watching tape through the week. You just get better knowing what to look at, knowing what tendencies to look at, as you go. When you're in college you think you know what you're doing but I really didn't."

But Siemian's studies went beyond the film room in 2015.

"He once said to Peyton, 'After a game, does the younger quarterback go up to the older quarterback? How does that work? What is the etiquette?' " Colleen said. "And Peyton said, 'Trevor, I'll tell you this, when you win the game, you wait for the other quarterback to come up to you. When you lose, you go up to the other quarterback.' "

During the preseason, when Manning stood in full uniform with a helmet on the sideline, he was asked by a reporter why he bothers dressing when he isn't playing. With Siemian standing nearby, Manning said, "because I have too much respect for the guys that are on the field."

Now the starter, Siemian arrives at Broncos headquarters around 6:15 a.m. and follows a daily script and arduous routine similar to Manning's. On game days, he has adopted a few of Manning's ways too.

In the first quarter against the Cowboys, Siemian threaded the needle after a play-action fake to hit wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders over the top in the end zone.

"That's a big-time throw with the right placement of the ball," coach Vance Joseph said. "That's hard to do."

In the second quarter, Siemian recognized a mismatch in coverage on third-and-9 and found running back C.J. Anderson, who cut inside and left Cowboys safety Jeff Heath on his back as he sprinted into the end zone.

"We knew we were getting man coverage in the red zone and Trev gave me a little double move route out of the backfield," Anderson said. "Thank God we worked on that route in practice multiple times."

Then in the third quarter, Siemian changed the call on third-and-6, yelled "Omaha" and handed the ball to Anderson, who skated around the right guard and up the middle of the line for a first down.

"The third-and-6 run check was something that 18 would have done," Anderson said, referring to Manning. "The things (Siemian) has seen, you can definitely see him go, 'Hey, I've seen that before,' and puts us in the right position."

Returning from surgery

Three days after the Broncos' 2016 season ended, Siemian flew to Los Angeles to have his left shoulder repaired. It was crushed in a Week 4 game at Tampa Bay, and for nearly three months he played in pain and with an ugly bump atop his joint. It was his separated clavicle pushing up under the skin.

Colleen, a nurse, and Walter, a surgeon, knew Trevor needed to get it repaired and knew he would need help after the surgery, so they flew him back to Orlando, Fla., for a month of their care. By then Siemian was a bona fide NFL starter, with plenty of bruises as proof. But he still carried around a perceived stain on his record.

"I think he's always going to have that stigma that he was a seventh-rounder," Colleen said. "He even said to us when he was home after his shoulder surgery, 'I'm going to have to get that seventh-round stigma off my back.' "

When he was cleared to return, Siemian was tasked with re-earning the job he had already won once before. And he would do so with a new coaching staff and another offense, and amid another summer of noise, dramatically titled The Decision by local sports talk radio.

At the start of the year, when Mike McCoy was hired as offensive coordinator and began to rebuild the Denver playbook, he spoke to his quarterbacks about their preferred plays. He wanted to know what they liked and disliked so he could tailor a system to fit both Siemian and Paxton Lynch. Now, when McCoy asks Siemian to review play sheets before game days, Siemian liberally uses his red pen.

"Mike gives me a hard time sometimes because we highlight our favorite plays on the call sheet and sometimes I give it back to him with freaking 70 percent of the call sheet highlighted," he said. "I think I'm just comfortable with a lot of the stuff we're doing. I don't speak for myself, but everybody's really comfortable at any given time of the game with what's being dialed up. We're just doing our best to execute."

With a revamped offensive line and revitalized running game, the Broncos lead the league in third-down percentage (.567) through two weeks. They also lead the league in yards rushing (averaging 159 per game in a 2-0 start). And they are tied for third in average scoring (33 points per game).

And Siemian, the seventh-rounder? He's tied for the league lead in touchdown passes (six) and has the company of Frank Tripucka and Manning as the only Broncos quarterbacks in history with at least 24 touchdown passes in their first 16 starts with the team.

"I mean, it's good," Siemian said coyly, always quashing attempts to goad him into boasting. "It's Week 2. We have a lot of guys that are doing a really good job within the scheme. For me, you drop back and you throw it to the open guy. It's worked out so far."

After the Broncos' win over Dallas, those four men wearing cowboy boots and cowboy hats and speaking with thick Texas accents begged Siemian's parents for a photo. One called his wife and told her the Cowboys got their butt kicked "but we met the nicest people!" And one even extended an offer to have Trevor join him on his sprawling Texas ranch for hunting. Colleen had told them during their day of friendly banter that Trevor was "a good ol' boy" who loved hunting and fishing.

She had also told them not to underestimate that seventh-round pick out of Northwestern.

Joseph issued a similar warning days later.

"In my opinion," Joseph said, "he is in total control of the offense right now."

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